What's your approach to marketing?

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I was asked recently why Trader Joe's is so successful when it doesn't do much marketing. If you view marketing by the amount of dollars spent on traditional advertising and promotion, then you could ask the same question of Whole Foods, Starbucks or indeed Apple.

But marketing in today’s connected world is so much more than this. It's everything the brand does. The effort put into the hand-drawn signs in-store, the Hawaiian shirts, the playful Trader Joe's brand packaging is as much marketing as a radio ad or the Fearless Flyer.

Rather than an image created through advertising, a brand is now defined by the experience customers have of interacting with it, and the sharing of their experience with their social networks. So marketing needs to focus on creating a coherent and positive customer experience.

This means getting three major elements aligned:

1. Being clear what the brand stands for, and why customers should care. If you're not clear, then you can't expect your customers or employees to be.

2. Flowing that through everything the brand produces. The products, the store environment, the online properties, and all the brand communication should feel a part of the same story.

3. Engaging the employees in living and breathing the brand, so that the way the brand behaves also reflects what the brand stands for, and why customers should care.

In this way, wherever or whenever customers experience the brand, it feels part of a coherent whole.

Simple to say of course, but difficult to do. What it really means is that marketing is not just a department, but also a company-wide endeavor. And that the dollars spent on traditional advertising and promotion is a misleading guide to a brand's marketing effort.

What's your company's approach?

Simon Uwins is a former CMO of fresh&easy and Tesco UK, and author of Creating Loyal Brands (2014). Find him online at www.simonuwins.com.